Il sapere dell'esperienza dell'operatore di polizia: uno studio grounded

The object of this research is to highlight the experiential knowledge of police officers serving in the patrolling squad. The study was generated by the following questions: what knowledge comes from the experience of a patroller? What are its features? What procedures, concepts and meanings lead the operator’s actions? What dispositions can help the enhancement of such knowledge? How to enhance the knowledge from experience, within the institution? The everyday experience of a police officer is imbued with grey areas and with excellent, albeit concealed, knowledge. Within this experience we can spot a «tacit» (Polanyi 195; 1979: 4), subliminal or implicit presence of forms and elements of knowledge that operate at the same speed of the gesture that embodies them, or the gaze that carries them, or the word that speaks of them. However, all the knowledge built up by the hard work of police officers is often lacking adequate testimony and visibility. (Mortari 2003: 20). The attempt to focus on the experiential knowledge in this professional area is an act of “epistemology of practice”(Schön 1983: 7), an attempt to go back to the founding premises of the operators’ daily knowledge, and the cognitive and emotional processes activated when their mind is involved in the solution of problematic situations. With regards to the way to bring forward the knowledge that constitutes the participants’ experience, the following methods have been suggested: the Grounded Theory Research (GTR) (Glaser, Strauss 1967; Strauss, Corbin 1990; Charmaz 2001 and 2006), the theoretical or purposeful sampling, and the narrative interview technique (Atkinson 2002), based on the reflective model suggested by Johns (2000). The results of this research lead us to believe that experience acts in this particular sector of public security as a true «master of life», for many participants. Very often, the participants declare to rely on their experience for the solution of problematic situations, transferring what they learned through experience to similar cases, and definitely not keeping an eye on their manuals. This allows us to assume that experience is perceived and felt not only at the core of their processes of learning and generation of knowledge, but also as a main and firm point of reference for the police action, at least for those who implement it. The discovery of a “repertoire of situations” and the rich experiential gain, which many participants relate that they rely on, can be considerede one of the evidence of Knowledge from experience. The practice of control over the territory appears to be not only a ground for the implementation of knowledge for a police officer, but also a source of knowledge, where any formal or informal, common-sense or metaphorical element plays an important role in their grip of reality. All the evidence gathered by the research is contained within active or passive experience, showing how it takes part, through the subjectivity of its actor, into the production of new ways to respond to the challenges rising from the practice.